Month: July 2017

WHO IS THE SOVEREIGN ON TEMPLE MOUNT?

This Tuesday, we will mark the 9th of Av, when the Temple was destroyed. The Temple represents our unity. When we restore our union, we will not need bricks to prove our place is here in Israel.

THE TEMPLE MOUNT in Jerusalem, the site of a deadly attack last week.. (photo credit:REUTERS)

It is no secret that the Arab smear campaign in the media and the organized “popular” protests against the placement of metal detectors at the entrances to the Temple Mount have nothing to do with security measures. From the perspective of the Wakf (the Islamic organization controlling and managing the Temple Mount), and the rest of the Arab world, the resistance to the detectors represents the resistance to Israel’s sovereignty on Temple Mount in particular, in the city of Jerusalem, and in all of Israel. The longer this campaign lasts, the more the Arabs will gain the favor of the world, and Israel will increasingly be seen as the bully in the neighborhood.

By now, hardly anyone remembers that the detectors were placed at the entrances because three terrorists opened fire on Israeli police, killing two officers and wounding a third. All that everyone sees now is that Israel is not letting Muslims pray in their holy site, when in fact, the only people keeping worshippers outside the Temple Mount are the Wakf, who are telling worshippers not to enter in protest of the placement of detectors.

The Temple—the Unity of Israel

Not only the Wakf objects to Israel’s authority on Temple Mount. The resolutions of UNESCO denying the Jewish history on Temple Mount, Jerusalem, and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron represent the view of the entire world that we do not belong here. If the UN were to vote today on the establishment of a Jewish state, who would vote “Yes”? Probably not even America.

To be a sovereign in the land of Israel, and particularly on Temple Mount, you must understand what the Temple represents and lead your life accordingly. The book Netzah Israel (Chapter 4) writes, “The House was ruined due to unfounded hatred, for their hearts divided and they parted and were unworthy of a Temple, which is the unity of Israel.”

If we honestly reflect on our society, on what we project to the world, it is clear that we are deeply divided and project disunity and discord everywhere. The Maharal of Prague writes in Hidushey Avot (Gittin 55b): “The Temple should be the wholeness of the entire world, not of Israel alone. …Since the Temple is the wholeness of the entire world, the nations included, it was not ruined by the nations, but only by unfounded hatred and division, when Israel divided.”

In other words, the Temple does not belong to any one nation or faith; it represents the unification of the world. Therefore, only those who advocate and execute unity merit being there. The Hebrew word Yehudi (Jew) comes from the word yihudi,meaning united(Yaarot Devash, Part 2, Drush no. 2). When we, Jews, united “as one man with one heart,” it was the first and only time in history when people of different, often rival clans from all over Babylon and the Near East united and forged a nation. Our unity, therefore, was a model for the entire world to follow. As a result, immediately following the establishment of our peoplehood, we were commanded to be “a light unto nations,” to take our method of unity to the rest of humanity.

The book Sefat Emet (Shemot, Yitro) describes what it means to be “a light unto nations”: “The children of Israel are guarantors in that they received the Torah [the light of unity] in order to correct the entire world.” But if we are not united, and therefore do not project unity to the rest of the world, can we truly regard ourselves as the “children of Israel”? And if we are not truly the children of Israel, united like the children of Israel are meant to be, can we claim sovereignty over the land?

The Sedition Conquered the City, and the Romans Conquered the Sedition

Jewish-Roman historian Josephus Flavius lived at the time of the ruin and witnessed many of the events first hand. He wrote very clearly about the causes of the ruin of the Temple and the exile (The Wars of the Jews,Book IV, Chapter 6): “The sedition [among the Jews] conquered the city, and the Romans conquered the sedition.” In the days of the Temple, Flavius details, “The attribute the [Jews] lacked most was mercy. …They transferred their rage from the living to the slain, and from the slain to the living [of their own people]. The terror was so great that the survivors called the dead ‘happy,’ as they were already at rest. … These men trampled upon all the laws of men [love of others], and ridiculed the words of the prophets. Yet, these prophets foretell … that the city should be taken and the sanctuary burnt by war when a sedition invades the Jews, and their own hand should pollute the Temple. Now these zealots … made themselves the instruments of the fulfillment [of the prophecies].”

When you think of the current hatred between the two sides of the political map in Israel, or between the two sides of the political map among US Jews, the similarities to the enmity among our ancestors are too striking to ignore. “At the end of the period of the Second Temple,” writes the book A Letter from Elijah (Part 3), “strife and hatred intensified in Israel, and pride was the root of the desire for absolute dominance. This brought them into hatred of their fellow person until they could not stand the very existence of the other. From that root of pride also emerged the audacity to sin shamelessly, for they did not perceive the contradiction between their actions and their views, and their conscience did not cause them to conceal their actions. And if they do not care about the conflict between their views and their actions, then they are regarded as ‘all sin.’ These are the things that caused the ruin of the House.”

A Land without a Sovereign

Today, we have a state, and we seemingly have sovereignty. But the name, “The State of Israel,” is still devoid of content. Our intolerance toward each other, our disdain toward our own people is skyrocketing. If we do not realize that we are repeating the same crime of unfounded hatred we committed two millennia ago, we will be banished from this land again until we are ready to unite above our differences as did our forefathers in the desert.

This Monday evening, we will mark the ninth of Av, the date when the Temple was destroyed. But it was destroyed in our hearts long before the bricks were set ablaze. With these compelling words, The Hida describes this inner ruin (Devarim Achadim, Tractate no. 6): “What can we say when we regret all day the ruin of the House and the [absence of] redemption? …It was all ruined because of unfounded hatred, and if we are disunited now and there is unfounded hatred, how can the House be built, since the cause of our ruin has not ceased from us? How can we say that we await Your salvation all the day while there is still unfounded hatred in our midst? Woe, how can man do good deeds as long as his impurity of baseless hatred is still in him?”

To be the landlords in the land of Israel, we must become once more the people of Israel, yehudim [Jews] from the word, yihudi [united]. Unless we reconstruct our unity and reassume our commitment to be a beacon of unity unto nations, the world will not support our being here and we will be expelled once more.

Sovereignty in the land of Israel is unlike the sovereignty in any other land—acquired by military might. This land has no sovereign; its dwellers are people who are willing to connect, to unite above their hatred, just like our forefathers. If we can learn the lesson from the horrors of our ancestors and transcend our selfish egos, we will merit staying here, and the entire world will be behind us. But if we opt once more for enmity, then we will suffer the hostility of the entire world, but not before we scuffle with each other once again.

As taken from, http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Who-is-the-sovereign-on-Temple-Mount-500857 on July 30, 2017.

I am asleep, but my heart is awake. (Song of Songs 5:2)

Our sages tell us that “when King Solomon built the Holy Temple, knowing that it was destined to be destroyed, he built a place in which to hide the Ark, [at the end of] hidden, deep, winding passageways.”1

It was there that King Josiah placed the Ark twenty-two years before the Temple’s destruction, as related in the Book of Chronicles.2

The Holy Temple in Jerusalem was built by King Solomon in the year 2928 from creation (833 BCE), and was destroyed 410 years later, on the ninth day of the month of Av, by the armies of the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar. Seventy years later it was rebuilt; the second Temple stood for 420 years, until its destruction by the Romans, also on the ninth of Av, in 3829 (69 CE). Ever since, 9 Av has been a day of fasting and repentance—a day on which we mourn the destruction, and pray for the coming of Moshiach, when the third and final Temple will be restored to its place as the divine epicenter of the universe.

The Holy Temple was G‑d’s home, the place in which He chose to manifest His all-pervading truth. How, then, could it have been destroyed by human hands? Only because the very structure of the Temple allowed for this possibility. This is the deeper significance of the fact that King Solomon built the Holy Temple “knowing that it was destined to be destroyed” and incorporated into it a hiding place for the Ark for that eventuality. Had the Temple not been initially constructed with the knowledge of, and the provision for, what was to happen on the ninth of Av, no mortal could have moved a single stone from its place.

The Places of the Ark

The fact that the Ark’s hiding place was built into the Holy Temple from the very beginning also carries another implication: it means that the first, second and third Temples are not three different structures, but the continuum of a single edifice.

The Ark contained the two tablets of stone, inscribed with the Ten Commandments by the hand of G‑d, which Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. It was the holiest object in the Temple, and the sole object in the Temple’s innermost chamber, the Holy of Holies. Indeed, our sages define the primary function of the Holy Temple as the housing of the Ark, for the Ark constituted “the resting place of the Shechinah (divine presence).”3

Thus, the underground chamber built by Solomon is much more than another “part” of the Holy Temple. The fact that it was constructed for the express purpose of containing the Ark means that it is of a piece with the Holy of Holies—the very heart of the Temple and its raison d’être.4

This is further underscored by the fact that the Ark has remained in this chamber from the time that it was placed there by Josiah, twenty-two years before the destruction of the First Temple, to this very day. This means that for the 420 years of the Second Temple, the Ark was not in the Holy of Holies, but in its underground chamber. But if the most fundamental function of the Temple is to house the Ark, how can there be a Holy Temple without an Ark? Also, at the time that Josiah hid the Ark, there was not yet any threat to the Holy Temple or to the Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem, only the prophetic knowledge that the Temple was destined to be destroyed. If the essence of the Holy Temple would have been negated by the removal of the Ark below ground, this would certainly not have been done until there was actual danger that the Ark might fall into enemy hands. Obviously, then, the underground hiding place of the Ark is no less part of the Holy Temple, and no less valid a place for the Ark, than the (aboveground) Holy of Holies.

In other words, the Holy Temple was initially designed and built to exist in two states: a revealed state and a concealed state. Accordingly, there were two designated places for the Ark in the Holy Temple—the aboveground portion of the Holy of Holies, and the chamber hidden at the end of “deep, winding passageways.” In its revealed state, the Holy Temple was a beacon of divine light, a place where man openly perceived and experienced the divine presence.5 In its concealed state, the divine revelation in the Holy Temple is muted, or almost completely obscured. But as long as the Temple houses the Ark, it continues to serve as the dwelling of G‑d.

In the twenty-eight centuries since it was first built, the Holy Temple has never ceased to fulfill its fundamental function as the seat of the divine presence in the world. There were times in which the entire structure stood in all its glory atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, times in which it existed in a diminished form (as in the Second Temple era), and times in which it was almost entirely destroyed. But a certain part of the Holy Temple has never been disturbed, and there its heart has never ceased to beat. When the “Third” Temple will be built, speedily in our days, and the Ark restored to its aboveground chamber, it will not be a new edifice, or even a “rebuilding,” but a revelation and reasserting of what has been present all along.

Deep and Winding

“Because we have sinned before You . . . our city was destroyed, our Sanctuary laid waste; our grandeur was banished, and the glory departed from our House of Life; no longer are we able to fulfill our duties in Your chosen home, in the great and holy house upon which Your name is proclaimed . . .”6

As these lines express, the Temple’s susceptibility to destruction is, on the most basic level, a negative thing. Because G‑d knew that we might prove unworthy of His manifest presence in our lives, He instructed that the Holy Temple be built in such a way as to allow for periods of diminution and concealment.

But our vulnerability to sin is but G‑d’s “awesome plot on the sons of man.”7G‑d created us with the capacity to do wrong only to enable us to uncover “the greater light that comes from darkness”8—to enable us to exploit the momentum of our lowest descents to drive our highest achievements. There is much to be achieved through the virtuous development of our positive potential; but nothing compares with the fervor of the repentant sinner, with the passion of one who has confronted his darkest self to recoil in search of light. No man can pursue life with the intensity of one who is fleeing death.

For centuries the Holy Temple has lain desolate, its essence contracted in a subterranean chamber deep beneath its ruined glory. But this terrible descent is, in truth, but the impetus for even higher ascent, even greater good, even more universal perfection, than what shone forth from the Temple in its first and second incarnations.

The paths to this chamber are hidden, deep and winding. This is not the straight and true path of the righteous, but the furtive, convoluted path of the “returnee” (baal teshuvah)—a path that plunges to the depths of his soul to unleash the most potent forces buried therein.9

No one disputes the site’s importance to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It’s only because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that either side insists to claim the Mount as its own

by, David B. Green

In an essay he wrote for the scholarly anthology “Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade,” the Muslim Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh makes the point that it couldn’t have been the Prophet Mohammed’s night journey to al-Haram al-Sharif – what the Jews call the Temple Mount – that bestowed holiness on that spot: “rather, Muhammad’s visit must have been made because of the spot’s already-existing sanctity.”

One needn’t be a nonbeliever to acknowledge that Jerusalem in general, and the Sacred Esplanade – to use the neutral terminology employed by the ecumenical team of editors and writers of “Where Heaven and Earth Meet” (principal editors Oleg Grabar and Benjamin Z. Kedar) – in particular, is of central symbolic significance to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And it’s hardly a coincidence, considering that first Christianity and then Islam built upon the traditions of their predecessors and claimed to supersede them. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the stories all three of these monotheistic faiths tell about the Mount.

It is only because of the never-ending conflict between Israelis and Palestinians – a political struggle that is taking on an increasingly religious character – that either side feels compelled to insist that its claim to the Mount is an exclusive one, and insists on denying its rivals’ connection to it.

No one can say what the significance of the hill known as Zion and as Moriah was to the Canaanites who inhabited Jerusalem before the Israelites conquered it in roughly 1000 B.C.E. We’re told in 2 Samuel 24 that the conqueror, King David, insisted on paying for the threshing floor he received from the Jebusite king Araunah. It was there that God instructed him to establish an altar and make an offering, thus bringing to an end a calamitous plague that had killed 70,000 of his people.

Later, it was David’s son Solomon who built the Temple on the site of that same altar. These Biblical accounts are not contemporary records of events. Rather, the narrative of Solomon that appears in 1 Kings 6, like the books of Joshua, Judges and Samuel, was probably written hundreds of years later, at about the turn of the 7th century B.C.E. It may well be that the reports of David’s altar and his city and of Solomon’s Temple being built on the location of the Jebusite town were written that way in order to clearly establish how the Israelites’ monotheism superseded the pagan religion of the Canaanite Jebusites.

The later a Hebrew text was written, it seems, the further back the Israelitic claim to Jerusalem seems to go. Genesis 22, for example, places the Binding of Isaac in the Land of Moriah, but it is only in 2 Chronicles that the connection is made between “Moriah” and Jerusalem. There we read how, “Solomon began to build the House of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where [the Lord] appeared unto David his father; for which provision had been made in the Place of David, in the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite” (2 Chronicles 3:1). That text, say Bible scholars, was likely written several hundred years later still.

Finally, the Talmud, compiled even later, claims that “the world was created from Zion” (Yoma 54b), and in it and later midrashic texts we find references to Adam, Cain and Noah having made sacrifices to God in Jerusalem. (It is actually a Christian tradition that places “Mount Zion” in the spot just outside the southwest corner of the Old City, presumably because of the belief that this is the location of David’s tomb, and David is the progenitor of Jesus. Locating Mount Zion there also reflected “the [Christian] wish to annul the Temple Mount’s sanctity,” according to scholar Rachel Elior.)

Christianity is meant to be a universal faith based on spiritual beliefs, not acts of sacrifice. Nonetheless, its seminal texts establish Jesus’ bona fides, so to speak, by having some of the major events of his life take place in Jerusalem, beginning with the tradition, in the Gospel of Luke, that Jesus’ parents brought him to the Temple after his birth for service and only returned to take him back when he was 12. Later, all of the gospels describe Jesus coming to the Temple and turning out in disgust the animal traders and money-changers from its courtyard. In John 4, Jesus tells a Samaritan woman whom he meets at Mount Gerizim that “the time is coming when it will no longer matter whether you worship the Father on this mountain or in Jerusalem.” The sacrifices and the Temple where they are offered become unnecessary after Jesus himself is sacrificed in Jerusalem by way of his crucifixion. The Koran, Islam’s primary scripture, does not mention Jerusalem by name. It is only in the hadiths, the supplementary texts that report on the words and acts of the Prophet Mohammed, that the connection is made between al-Masjid al-Aqsa, the “Farthest Mosque,” mentioned in sura 17 of the Koran, and Jerusalem.

According to the Koran, Mohammed made “a journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque whose precincts We did bless, in order that We might show him some of Our Signs.” According to Muslim scholar Mustafa Abu Sway, “the hadith scholars, Qur’an commentators, and all of Islamic tradition take this particular verse seriously and consider the Sacred Mosque to be in Mecca and the Farthest Mosque to be in Jerusalem. No Muslim scholar challenged this position throughout Islamic intellectual history” (from his essay “The Holy Land, Jerusalem, and the Aqsa Mosque in the Islamic Sources” in “Where Heaven and Earth Meet”). These later texts also make the connection between Aqsa (Farthest) Mosque and “Bayt al-Maqdis” – House of the Holy, or “Beit Hamikdash,” the Hebrew term for the Temple. As noted, for details of Mohammed’s night journey, in which his horse Buraq carried him from Mecca to Jerusalem (a trip called the “Isra”), where he prayed and then ascended to Heaven (the “Mi’raj”) to converse with God before returning to earth – all of this in the course of a single night – one has to turn to the hadith texts.

What the account does do, however, is establish the Muslim link to Jerusalem. In fact, Jerusalem quickly became universally considered the third-holiest site for Muslims, after Mecca and Medina. Mohammed died in 632 C.E. and was succeeded as caliph first by Abu Bakr and then by Umar (although this succession was disputed by the group that became the Shi’a). It is the latter who conquered Jerusalem in 635-638 and established the Dome of the Rock (sometimes mistaken called the Mosque of Umar) and the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the site of the ruins of the Herodian Second Temple.

The reign of Umar in Jerusalem was known for its relative tolerance. The next millennium and a half, of course, was characterized by successive conquests of the city, with the fortunes of the different faiths in it rising and sinking depending on who was sovereign there.

The turn of the Jews came only in 1967, with the Six-Day War and the unification of the divided city under Israeli rule. In general, Israel’s policy has been one of religious tolerance and openness. When Israeli authorities closed the Temple Mount to Muslim worshippers for two days after the July 14 killing of two Border Policemen there, it was the first time they had done so since 1969. But the question of who’s in charge has been a sensitive one – an extreme understatement – since the day in June 1967 that an Israel Defense Forces soldier raised an Israeli flag over Al-Aqsa Mosque, only to have Defense Minister Moshe Dayan order it removed minutes later. In such a situation, it is not surprising that there is little room for magnanimity, with each side on constant alert for any change in the status quo and any sign that the other side is gradually encroaching on its position. Any backing down is interpreted by both publics as a sign of weakness. Infinitesimally small actions can set off a conflict whose stakes will be unthinkably high.

It is time to start thinking big about Halacha. Great opportunities are awaiting us and too much is at stake to let them pass by. For too long, Halacha has been jailed in compartmentalized and awkward boxes. It is time to liberate it.

Most religious Jews are not aware that Halacha has nearly become passé. They believe it is thriving. After all, Halacha is very “in” and there are more books on this subject than ever before. Despite this, it lacks courage. We have fallen in love with – and become overwhelmed by – an endless supply of all-encompassing but passive halachic information, which does not get processed but only recycled. We have access to a nearly infinite amount of information via the Internet, books, journals and pamphlets, providing us with all the knowledge we could ever dream of. The problem is that this easily accessible information has replaced creative thinking. It has expelled the possibility for big ideas, and we have grown scared of them. We only tolerate and admire bold ideas when they provide us with profit-making inventions – when we feel our empty pockets – but not when they dare challenge our hollow souls. We do not discuss big ideas because they are too abstract and ethereal.

Novelty is always seen as a threat. It carries with it a sense of violation; a kind of sacrilege. It asks us to think, to stretch our brains. This requires too much of an effort and doesn’t suit our most important concern: the need for instant satisfaction. We love the commonplace instead of the visionary, and therefore do not produce people who have the capacity to deliver true innovation.

It is only among some very small, secular elite groups that we see staggering ideas emerging (Hawking and black holes, Aumann and game theory). In the department of Halacha, with only few exceptions, we rarely find anyone who even comes close to suggesting something really new. This is all the more true within Orthodox Judaism. While in ages past, discussions within Halacha could ignite fires of debate, we are now confronted with an increasingly post-idea Halacha. Provoking ideas that would boggle our minds are no longer “in.” If anything, they are condemned as heresy. Since they cannot easily be absorbed into our self-made halachic boxes, and they don’t bring us the complacency we long for, we stick to the mainstream where we can dream our mediocre dreams and leave things as they are.

The Retreat of Creative Thinking

Most of our yeshivot have retreated from creative thinking. We encourage the narrowest specialization rather than push for daring ideas. We are producing a generation that believes its task is to tend potted plants rather than plant forests.

We offer our young people prepared experiences in which we tell them what to think instead of teaching them how to think. We rob them of the capacity to learn what thinking is really all about. The plethora of halachic works, which educate them in the minutiae of the most intricate parts of Jewish law, hardly generate the inspiration for new ideas about these laws. In fact, they stand in the way. There is no time for anyone to process all the information even if they want to. But instead of seeing this as a problem, they and their teachers have turned it into a virtue.

And that is exactly the point. We are faced with two extremes: either our youth walk out on or maintain a lukewarm relationship with Jewish observance, or they become so obsessed by its finest points that they are incapable of seeing the forest for the trees and they consequently turn into rigid religious extremists.

What we fail to realize is that this is the result of our own educational system. In both cases, young people have fallen victim to the disease of information for the sake of information.

Information is not simply to have. It is there to be converted into something much larger than itself; it is there to produce ideas that make sense of all the information gathered in order to move it forward to higher latitudes. Information is not there to be possessed, but to be comprehended.

Jewish education today is, for the most part, producing a generation of religious Jews who know more and more about Jewish observance, but think less and less about what it means. This is even truer of their teachers. Some are even Talmudic scholars, but these very scholars don’t realize that they have drowned in their vast knowledge. The more they know, the less they understand. Just as a young child may think it is an act of kindness to lift a fish out of an aquarium and “save” it, so these Rabbis may be choking their students while thinking they are providing them with spiritual oxygen. Doing so, they rewrite Halachic Judaism in ways that are totally foreign to the very ideas that it truly stands for. They are embalming Halacha while claiming it is alive, because it continues to maintain its external shape.

Fewer and fewer young religious people have proper knowledge of the great halachic arbitrators of the past. They know little of their weltanschauung. And even when they do, the ideas of these great thinkers are presented to them as information, instead of as challenges to their own thinking or as prompts to the development of their own creativity. This is a tragedy. Our current halachic, spiritual and intellectual challenges cannot be answered by simply looking backwards and giving answers that once worked, but are now outdated.

The Quest for Certainty Paralyzes the Search for Meaning

Instead of new theories, hypotheses and great ideas, we get instant answers to questions of the utmost importance, offered via a wide variety of self-help books, the authors of which seem to claim that their halachic information came directly from Sinai. Trivial, simplistic, and often incorrect information replaces significant ideas. The information is reduced to a catchline – thus too brief and unsupported by proper arguments – yet still presented as “the answer.” By delivering “perfect” answers, which fit nicely into the often underdeveloped philosophies of their authors, everything is done to crush the questioning of halachic conclusions. The quest for certainty paralyzes the search for meaning.It is uncertainty that is the very stimulus impelling man to unfold his intellectual capacity. Every idea within Halacha is multifaceted – filled with contradictions, opposing opinions, and unsolvable paradoxes. The greatness of the Talmudic Sages was that they shared with their students their own struggles and doubts and their attempts at solving them, as when Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, Rava and Abaye debated major halachic problems; their fierce disagreements rooted in their outlook on life and how they saw Judaism.(Eruvin 13b.) Students were made privy to their teachers’ inner lives, and that made their discussions exciting. The teachers created tension in their classes, waged war with their own ideas and asked their students to fight them with knives between their teeth. They were not interested in teaching their students final halachic decisions, but instead asked them to take them apart, to deconstruct them so as to rediscover the questions. These teachers realized that not all halachic paradoxes can be solved, because life itself is full of paradoxes. They also realized that an answer is always a form of death, but a question opens the mind and inspires the heart.

It is true that this approach is not without risk, but there is no authentic life choice that is risk free. Nothing is worse than giving in to the indolence and callousness that stifles inquiry and leaves one drifting with the current. Such an approach shrinks the universe of the Halacha to a self-centered and self-satisfying ideological ghetto, robbing it of its most essential component: the constant debate about the religious meaning of life and how to live in God’s presence and move to higher levels.

The Greatest Proof of Judaism’s Decline is the Prodigiously Large Number of Like-Minded Religious Jews

Outreach programs, although well intentioned, have become institutions that, like factories, focus on mass production and believe that the more people they can draw into Jewish observance, the more successful they are. That their methods crush the minds of many newcomers who might have made a major contribution to a new and vigorous Halacha is of no importance to them. The goal is to fit them into the existing system. That their outdated theories make other independent minds abhor Judaism and Halacha is a thought they do not seem to even entertain. To them, only numbers count. How many people did we make observant? Millions of dollars are spent to create more and more of the same type of religious Jew. Like the generation of the Tower of Babel, in which the whole world was “of one language and of one speech,” we are producing a religious Jewish community of artificial conformism in which independent thought and difference of opinion is not only condemned, but its absence is considered to be the ultimate ideal. We have created a generation of yes men. We desperately need to heed what Kierkegaard said about Christianity: “The greatest proof of Christianity’s decay is the prodigiously large number of [like-minded] Christians.” (M.M. Thulstrup, “Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Imitation,” in A Kierkegaard Critique, ed. H.A. Johnson and N. Thulstrup (New York: Harper, 1962), 277.)

Insight has been replaced with clichés, flexibility with obstinacy, and spontaneity with habit. What was once one of the great pillars of Judaism – the esteemed value of spiritual, intellectual and moral dissent – has become anathema. Instead of teaching the art of audacity, we are now educating a generation of kowtowers.

There is social ostracism of any kind of healthy rebellion against the conventional. The famous Orthodox Rabbi, Eliezer Berkovits, was ignored when he argued that Halacha had become defensive; the master thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel’s understanding of Halacha is completely disregarded by Orthodoxy; Charedi yeshivot pay no attention to Rav Kook.

During the three weeks between 17 Tammuz and Tisha b’Av, as we recall the destruction of the Temples, we read three of the most searing passages in the prophetic literature, the first two from the opening of the book of Jeremiah, the third, next week, from the first chapter of Isaiah.

At perhaps no other time of the year are we so acutely aware of the enduring force of ancient Israel’s great visionaries. The prophets had no power. They were not kings or members of the royal court. They were (usually) not priests or members of the religious establishment. They held no office. They were not elected. Often they were deeply unpopular, none more so than the author of this week’s haftarah, Jeremiah, who was arrested, flogged, abused, put on trial and only narrowly escaped with his life. Only rarely were the prophets heeded in their lifetimes: the one clear exception was Jonah, and he spoke to non-Jews, the citizens of Nineveh. Yet their words were recorded for posterity and became a major feature of Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. They were the world’s first social critics and their message continues through the centuries. As Kierkegaard almost said: when a king dies, his power ends; when a prophet dies his influence begins.[1]

What was distinctive about the prophet was not that he foretold the future. The ancient world was full of such people: soothsayers, oracles, readers of runes, shamans and other diviners, each of whom claimed inside track with the forces that govern fate and “shape our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” Judaism has no time for such people. The Torah bans one “who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead” (Deut. 18:10-11). It disbelieves such practices because it believes in human freedom. The future is not pre-scripted. It depends on us and the choices we make. If a prediction comes true it has succeeded; if a prophecy comes true it has failed. The prophet tells of the future that will happen if we do not heed the danger and mend our ways. He (or she – there were seven biblical prophetesses) does not predict; he or she warns.

Nor was the prophet distinctive in blessing or cursing the people. That was Bilaam’s gift, not Isaiah’s or Jeremiah’s. In Judaism, blessing comes through priests not prophets.

Several things made the prophets unique. The first was his or her sense of history. The prophets were the first people to see God in history. We tend to take our sense of time for granted. Time happens. Time flows. As the saying goes, time is God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. But actually there are several ways of relating to time and different civilisations have perceived it differently.

There is cyclical time: time as the slow turning of the seasons, or the cycle of birth, growth, decline and death. Cyclical time is time as it occurs in nature. Some trees have long lives; most fruit flies have short ones; but all that lives, dies. The species endures, individual members do not. Kohelet contains the most famous expression of cyclical time in Judaism: “The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course … What has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Then there is linear time: time as an inexorable sequence of cause and effect. The French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace gave this idea its most famous expression in 1814 when he said that if you “know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed,” together with all the laws of physics and chemistry, then “nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present” before your eyes. Karl Marx applied this idea to society and history. It is known as historical inevitability, and when transferred to the affairs of humankind it amounts to a massive denial of personal freedom.

Finally there is time as a mere sequence of events with no underlying plot or theme. This leads to the kind of historical writing pioneered by the scholars of ancient Greece, Herodotus and Thucydides.

Each of these has its place, the first in biology, the second in physics, the third in secular history, but none was time as the prophets understood it. The prophets saw time as the arena in which the great drama between God and humanity was played out, especially in the history of Israel. If Israel was faithful to its mission, its covenant, then it would flourish. If it was unfaithful it would fail. It would suffer defeat and exile. That is what Jeremiah never tired of telling his contemporaries.

The second prophetic insight was the unbreakable connection between monotheism and morality. Somehow the prophets sensed – it is implicit in all their words, though they do not explain it explicitly – that idolatry was not just false. It was also corrupting. It saw the universe as a multiplicity of powers that often clashed. The battle went to the strong. Might defeated right. The fittest survived while the weak perished. Nietzsche believed this, as did the social Darwinists.

The prophets opposed this with all their force. For them the power of God was secondary; what mattered was the righteousness of God. Precisely because God loved and had redeemed Israel, Israel owed Him loyalty as their sole ultimate sovereign, and if they were unfaithful to God they would also be unfaithful to their fellow humans. They would lie, rob, cheat: Jeremiah doubts whether there was one honest person in the whole of Jerusalem (Jer. 5:1). They would become sexually adulterous and promiscuous: “I supplied all their needs, yet they committed adultery and thronged to the houses of prostitutes. They are well-fed, lusty stallions, each neighing for another man’s wife” (Jer. 5:7-8).

Their third great insight was the primacy of ethics over politics. The prophets have surprisingly little to say about politics. Yes, Samuel was wary of monarchy but we find almost nothing in Isaiah or Jeremiah about the way Israel/Judah should be governed. Instead we hear a constant insistence that the strength of a nation – certainly of Israel/Judah – is not military or demographic but moral and spiritual. If the people keep faith with God and one another, no force on earth can defeat them. If they do not, no force can save them. As Jeremiah says in this week’s haftarah, they will discover too late that their false gods offered false comfort:

They say to wood, ‘You are my father,’ and to stone, ‘You gave me birth.’ They have turned their backs to me and not their faces; yet when they are in trouble, they say, ‘Come and save us!’ Where then are the gods you made for yourselves? Let them come if they can save you when you are in trouble! For you have as many gods as you have towns, O Judah. (Jer. 2:27-28)

Jeremiah, the most passionate and tormented of all the prophets, has gone down in history as the prophet of doom. Yet this is unfair. He was also supremely a prophet of hope. He is the man who said that the people of Israel will be as eternal as the sun, moon and stars (Jer. 31). He is the man who, while the Babylonians were laying siege to Jerusalem, bought a field as a public gesture of faith that Jews would return from exile: “For this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Houses, fields and vineyards will again be bought in this land” (Jer. 32).

Jeremiah’s feelings of doom and hope were not in conflict: there were two sides of the same coin. The God who sentenced His people to exile would be the God who brought them back, for though His people might forsake Him, He would never forsake them. Jeremiah may have lost faith in people; he never lost faith in God.

Prophecy ceased in Israel with Haggai, Zekharia and Malachi in the Second Temple era. But the prophetic truths have not ceased to be true. Only by being faithful to God do people stay faithful to one another. Only by being open to a power greater than themselves do people become greater than themselves. Only by understanding the deep forces that shape history can a people defeat the ravages of history. It took a long time for biblical Israel to learn these truths, and a very long time indeed before they returned to their land, re-entering the arena of history. We must never forget them again.

As taken from, http://rabbisacks.org/prophetic-voice-matot-masei-5777/ on July 20, 2017

Some of these will surprise you.

by Dr. Yvette Alt Miller

Last names are a relatively new phenomenon. In ancient times, many people were known by their first name only. Jews often added the names of their fathers or their mothers to their names, and still do today in religious situations, being called by their name “ben” (son of) or “bat” (daughter of) their parent’s name. Jews descended from the priestly groups of Cohens and Levis sometimes note this status in their name; indeed, variations of “Cohen” and “Levi” are the most common Jewish last names today.

Within the Jewish community, widespread adoption of last names was first seen after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, when many Jewish families adopted the names of their family’s hometowns as a surname. The last name of the famous singer Joan Baez, who is Jewish, for instance refers to the Spanish town of Baza. Baruch Spinoza evoked the name of Espinosa, a town in Spain from where his ancestors hailed. Many other Jews gained place-based surnames two hundred years later, when the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Joseph II decreed that his subjects adopt last names; the custom was seen at the time as modern.

Here is a list of some common Jewish last names and their meanings. Some of these might surprise you!

Abrams: from the Biblical patriarch Abraham, who moved from what is today Iraq to Israel

Abramson: a patronymic name (from one’s father) meaning son of Abraham

Becker: Germanic name for baker, refers to an ancestor who was a Jewish baker

Blau: meaning blue, this name reflects the popularity of colors as surnames among German-speaking Jews

Blum: from the Jewish woman’s name Bluma, meaning “flower” in Yiddish

Cantor: one who sings in a synagogue (Chazzan in Hebrew)

Cohen:from the priestly caste who served in the Jewish Temple in ancient times

Cooperman: Cooper is a form of the Yiddish nickname Yankel, meaning Jacob

Diamond: this name reflects the popularity of using beautiful gems as surnames among German-speaking Jews

Ehrlich: a name bestowed in the Austro-Hungarian Empire meaning “honest”

Eisen: meaning “iron”, it was a popular choice for Austrian Jews

Elkayim: this Middle Eastern Jewish name refers to a family profession and means tentmaker

Fingerhut: from the Yiddish word for “thimble”, this name refers to an ancestor who was a tailor

Fishman: this name means fish-seller, and refers to a family’s profession

Gelb: Like Geller, this name means yellow in Yiddish, and was often given to people with light hair

Geller: Yiddish for yellow, this name was often given to people with lighter or reddish hair

Gold: many German-speaking Jews adopted the names of precious metals, like gold, as names

Goldberg: this name refers to the towns of Goldberg in Germany and/or in Poland, both once home to Jewish communities. The name means “golden town”.

Goldman: a popular choice among Austrian Jews for its beautiful connotation “gold” and “man”

Goldschmidt: this Germanic name refers to an ancestor who worked as a goldsmith

Green: adopting colors as surnames was popular among Austro-Hungarian Jews

Greenberg: referring to the towns of Grunberg in Germany and Poland, both once home to Jewish communities

Hakimi: this Persian surname is derived from the Arabic “Hakim” meaning wise

Horowitz: referring to the town of Horovice in the Czech Republic, once home to a Jewish community

Kaplan: a Germanic form of Cohen, the priestly workers who served in the Temple in Jerusalem

Katz: acronym of “Kohen Tzedek”, or “righteous Cohen”, one who served in the Temple in Jerusalem

Kauffman: a form of the Yiddish nickname Yankel (meaning Jacob) plus the German for man

Koppelman: derived from Koppel, a Yiddish nickname for Jacob, plus the German suffix “man”

Koval: this Slavic name refers to an ancestor who was a blacksmith

Kravitz: this name recalls an ancestor’s occupation, and is a Slavic version of the word tailor

Leib: meaning lion, this name refers to the Jewish name Yehuda, who was compared to a lion (Gen. 49:9)

Levi/Levy: of the Tribe of Levi, descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron; members worked in the Temple

Levin: derived from Levi – members of the Tribe of Levi who served in the Temple in Jerusalem

Schwartz: this means black – many German speaking Jews adopted colors as surnames

Segal: a common name for members of the tribe of Levi, Segal is an acronym – “Segan Lekehunah”, or “second to the Cohen”, referring to working in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem

Shapiro: referring to the town of Speyer, in Germany, once home to a Jewish community

Singer: referring to an ancestor who sang in a synagogue as a cantor

Shamash: reflecting an ancestor’s occupation, this means one who worked in a synagogue

Shulman: “shul” means synagogue in Yiddish – this name was adopted by some caretakers of synagogues as a surname

Soros: from the Hebrew name Sarah, meaning “princess”

Stern: meaning “star”, many Austrian Jews thought this a beautiful name to choose

Weiss: meaning white, this name reflects the practice of adopting colors as surnames among German-speaking Jews

Weinberg: referring to any of various places in Europe which once were home to thriving Jewish communities, including the region of Mt. Weinberg in Westphalia, Germany, or towns named Weinberg in Germany, the Czech Republic or Poland

Wexler: Germanic form of moneychanger, one of the occupations to which Jews were restricted.

As taken from, http://www.aish.com/jw/s/The-Meaning-of-Some-Common-Jewish-Last-Names.html?s=show on July 19, 2017.

The story is told of a man who came to his rabbi with a request. “Make me a Cohen!” The rabbi was puzzled because a person acquires the designation of Cohen through paternal heredity — only if his father was a Cohen. He replied to the man, “I am sorry; I can’t make you a Cohen.” Before the rabbi could explain, the man insisted, “You have got to make me a Cohen; I’ll give you $10,000!” The rabbi again apologized that he couldn’t help him and started to explain, but the man interrupted again to raise the offer $25,000. In exasperation the rabbi asks, “Why is it so important for you to be a Cohen?” The man replies, “Because my father was a Cohen, his father was a Cohen and my great-grandfather was a Cohen!”

Since not everyone is aware of tribal designations in the Jewish people, I will explain.

What is a Cohen, Levite and Israel?

When the Torah is read, a Cohen (or Kohen) is called to make the blessings over reading the first portion. Then a Levite is called for the second portion. A Yisroel (Israelite) may then be called for the remaining portions to be read. A Cohen is usually accorded greater honor or precedence before a Levite or an Israel. What do these titles mean and how did they come about?

Jewish history starts with our forefather, Avraham (Abraham). His son Yitzhak (Isaac) continued the traditions and passed them on to his son, Ya’akov (Jacob). Twelve sons were born to Ya’akov: Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Zevulon, Issachar, Dan, Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Yosef (Joseph) and Binyamin. These were the original 12 tribes of Israel. Because of a special blessing from Ya’akov to Yosef, his portion was given to his two sons, Ephraim and Menashe, who were then elevated to equal status with Yosef’s brothers — so there were really 13 tribes!

Until the transgression of the Golden Calf, the firstborn sons were the ones who were designated to do the holy service in the Mishkan, the Portable Sanctuary, in the Desert. No one from the Tribe of Levi worshiped the Golden Calf and, therefore, the Almighty replaced the firstborn with the Tribe of Levi to serve in the sanctuary (Numbers 3:11-12). Levi had three sons: Gershon, Kehath and Merari. The work of the Sanctuary — erecting, dismantling, carrying, singing, assisting the Cohanim — was divided amongst the three families.

Moshe (Moses) and Aharon (Aaron) were brothers — descended from Amram the son of Kehath. While Moshe was the leader of the Jewish people in the desert, the Almighty designated Aharon as the Cohen Gadol (High Priest). For all time, Aharon and his descendants would be Cohanim (also spelled “Kohanim“). The Cohanim were the priests who performed the actual service in the Mishkan and later in the Temple in Jerusalem.

Throughout the 40 years in the desert, the Jewish people traveled according to their tribe. When we entered into the Land of Israel (1273 BCE), each tribe received a specific territory (except the Tribe of Levi which was given specific cities to live in). After the split of the Kingdom into Israel and Judah following the death of King Solomon, the Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE and exiled the Ten Tribes. Since then the Ten Tribes were not heard from and Jews can now only trace their lineage to the Cohanim and Levites. The rest of us reside under the designation of “Israelites” — not sure from which tribe we descend.

How does one find out if he is a Cohen or a Levite? If you can’t ask your father or your grandfather, then one can look through genealogical records for marriage certificates or official records. If one knows where his paternal forefathers are buried, he can check the tombstones for inscriptions. Sometimes on the tombstones of a Cohen are two hands with fingers spread as a Cohen would form his hands when blessing the Jewish people (Yes, Spock — Leonard Nemoy — as a boy in synagogue saw a Cohen blessing the congregants with the outstretched arms and hands with spread fingers …. and utilized the Cohen‘s “hand'” for the Vulcan “Live Long and Prosper” hand sign.) On the tombstone of a Levite there is sometimes an engraving of a pitcher symbolizing the service of the Levite in washing the Cohen‘s hands before the Cohen would bless the Jewish people.

Then again, one can always wait for Eliyahu (Elijah) the prophet who will precede the Moshiach (Messiah) and who will be able to inform us of our true tribal lineage!

Taken from, http://www.aish.com/tp/ss/ssw/434771743.html on July 17, 2017.